Development of a GUI framework for a GWT based collaboration application

In these modern days the borderline between desktop applications and web applications is getting thinner, due to advancements in development technologies and the rapid growth of available bandwidth. In this new environment desktop applications are getting marginalized by web applications with rich interfaces. These applications have left behind the traditional one request-response-per-page paradigm, and utilize the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) methodology for client-server communication, thus giving the sense of fluent interaction with the application for the user.

These AJAX web applications require new approach from developers and architects as well, because many traditional paradigms won’t apply for them.

Google created the – continuously evolving – Google Web Toolkit (referred as GWT from now on) for developing such AJAX applications.

The goal of my thesis is the implementation of a framework by Google Web Toolkit, that effectively supports the development process during client side development. GWT in itself is not a framework, as the name says, it is a toolkit.

The main goals of the framework are the following:

• It has to support the rapid and easy addition of new screen modules

• It must be transparent and easy to modify or improve

• It has to support automated testing

• It has to support internationalization

• It has to support the history management found on traditional web pages